Nike today has rolled out an update to the Nike Run Club app for Apple Watch. This update makes the Run Club app available completely independent of iOS, with Nike touting that you can “enjoy all the Apple Watch features without your phone.”

What this means is that you can open the App Store app on your Apple Watch running watchOS 6, and search for the Nike Run Club app. From there, you can download the app and go through the entire setup process completely on your Apple Watch. There’s no need to log-in to a Nike account, either.

Nike describes this as a completely “stand-alone experience.” When you open the Nike Run Club app on your Apple Watch for the first time, you’ll be asked various questions about your Health and Activity data, as well as whether or not you want to give Nike access to your location data.

Once you got though that initial setup process, the Nike Run Club app will function completely independent of your iPhone. One of the tentpole features of watchOS 6 is the new App Store. This gives developers the ability to build applications that don’t rely on a connected iPhone at all.

Apple this afternoon released watchOS 6.1 to the public, bringing watchOS 6 to the Apple Watch Series 1 and Series 2 for the first time.

It’s certainly nice to see Nike focusing so heavily on the Apple Watch, and hopefully it’s something that will continue into the future. You can download the Nike Run Club app now for free.

Read more:

  • Apple releasing watchOS 6.1 to the public with Apple Watch Series 1 and Series 2 support, more
  • watchOS 6 is now available, here are the top 6 new Apple Watch features
  • watchOS 6 will give customers with older Apple Watches new reasons to upgrade
  • iOS 13.2 now available with Deep Fusion, new emoji, Siri privacy settings, more
  • watchOS 6: Hands-on with the top new features for Apple Watch [Video]